12 Regions of China: The Inertia of Unity

This article series explores 12 distinct “regions” within China: six “core” regions long dominated by the majority Han ethnic group and six “periphery” regions home to many of China’s ethnic minorities. The series overview is available here. To view the full series, click here.

As I argued in the previous piece, China’s regional variation today is less politically significant than in times past. For all the tensions that the Chinese polity has inherited from its long history and that inhere in its vast size, regional disparities are unlikely to trigger its collapse or crackup into smaller units, as happened repeatedly up to the mid-20th century.

There Are No Major Political Cleavages Among the Vast Majority of the Population

This national straitjacket for political expression does not appear to stem from any lack of capacity by Han culture to embrace diversity or foreign ideas, given the development of distinct identities and pluralistic political cultures in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and among the overseas Chinese, including the independent nation of Singapore (and before it a Chinese Borneo Republic). Nor is the Party-state’s suppression of political heterodoxy a sufficient explanation for the general view among the Han populace – which any foreigner who has discussed these issues frequently with mainland Chinese can attest to – that there is properly only “one China.” This attitude has deep roots in China’s development as a unitary polity, which will likely always dampen the significance of regional variation.

By contrast, procedural injustice – corruption and the abuse of bureaucratic power – is a far more potent well of discontent in contemporary China. But this is dampened by the habit, ingrained through millennia of Confucian ethics and practice, of seeking to address grievances through appeals to higher authority. The continued resort to petitioning the central government to deal with local abuses reflects not just the limits imposed by state repression, but also a long-standing cultural bias toward attempting to rectify the exercise of official power, rather than to replace it with a different system of politics altogether.

In the anti-authority morality plays of Chinese popular culture, the rebellious heroes are eventually reconciled with government (and go on to serve it in the fight against foreigners). And even during the largest civil disobedience movement of post-imperial China, the 1989 Tiananmen protests, it was far from clear that the protesters were seeking more than correction of the most egregious abuses. Today the Chinese state exploits this cultural legacy through a well-rehearsed script for containing and defusing “mass incidents” of discontent, albeit one that has proven to have narrow limits. And President Xi Jinping’s continuing anti-corruption campaign, corrosive as it may be to Party unity, appears to be maintaining the public’s faith in (or at least acceptance of) the “good society” as consisting of centralized rule with autocratic rectitude.

It should be unsurprising then that identification with the centralized state – in abstract terms, given that Chinese people’s actual commitment to the nation was once likened to “a dish of loose sand” – became a touchstone for individuals’ sense of communality, similar to identification by race in the United States. Identity is to a large extent defined negatively, and in China the “other” was traditionally marked by alienation from the Chinese state’s authority. This goes a long toward explaining why the Han population still generally seems to tolerate what critics call China’s “dragon culture” of authoritarianism in government.

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Just as regional disparities and social cleavages will likely disappoint as vehicles for the “coming collapse of China,” so will the country’s much publicized ethnic tensions. If the institutions of central control do not face any serious challenge from the 92 percent of the population who are ethnic Han, why would the non-Han minorities present a credible threat, particularly when these groups lag in access to wealth and political influence? While minority discontent may present security problems in some areas – for example, the potential terrorist threat to pipelines and oil wells in Xinjiang – there is no real prospect of it catalyzing regional separation, let alone destabilizing the Party-state’s national authority.

This is especially true given China’s trend toward greater political and ideological integration. As noted earlier in this series, many minorities were long ruled through their indigenous forms of political organization, in some cases beyond the end of imperial China. Today, by contrast, the Party-state’s administrative structure and educational system extends throughout the land, with some receding linguistic concessions in minority-heavy areas. The Party claims that minorities constitute 6.6 percent of its membership nationwide (slightly less than their proportion of the total population), and by law the governors of China’s five ethnic autonomous regions must come from their region’s dominant minority. But the top Party cadres in these regions are all Han, quarantining ethnic identity from the true locus of political control.

Finally, divisions among China’s minorities undermine any potential for coordinated resistance to central authority. Inter-minority tensions are still a live issue in China: much of the violence in Tibetan areas during 2008, for instance, was directed against Hui as well as Han individuals. The Chinese state for its part has a long history of playing minorities against each other, some examples being the use of Uyghurs to crush revolts in the Southwest during the 1300s, and of Hui to suppress Uyghurs and Tibetans during the 1920-30s.

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All this means that despite the spread of fundamentalist Islam, the revival of international pan-Turkism and the continuation of a Tibetan exile government across the border in India, “splittism” on China’s minority frontiers will likely prove a phantom menace. To the extent that Xinjiang and the Tibetan areas threaten instability, this stems from a poisonous dialectic of rising state repression and growing radicalization, not from any real prospect of territorial separation. And what small aid such separatist sentiments might derive from neighboring countries is ebbing with the spread of China’s influence beyond its borders. The growing role that international relations will play in the fortunes of China’s different regions will be discussed in the last article in this series.

Next up: The conclusion of the series.

John Lee is a former visiting fellow of the Mercator Institute for China Studies. He tweets at @J_B_C16.

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John Lee

John Lee is a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS).